Mortal Sins: Sex, Crime, and the Era of Catholic Scandal

by D'Antonio, Michael

  “He warned me that my future would be very negatively affected if I continued to speak out,” recalled Doyle. “I told him that when people asked me questions I was going to answer them honestly.”

  After the two men went back and forth on the matter Doyle interrupted Laghi and said, “Archbishop, what we call this in America is a Mexican standoff. It means you aren’t going to back down and neither am I.” Laghi looked at Doyle as if he was watching a man throw away his life, and then invited him to lunch at the embassy. Doyle thought about the cold stares that would greet him in the dining room and the amount of alcohol he would have to consume to get through the meal and declined.

  * * *

  With one dead, one retired, and one ruined as a career churchman, the trio of loyal Catholics who set out to save the Church from itself had finished their effort to change it from within. Their report, however, would become a primary text for victims of clergy abuse and their attorneys, as well as writers and TV producers. In the courts and the press it would be cited repeatedly as evidence that church leaders had been informed of the problem and were given options for addressing it, which they rejected.

  The power of the Mouton-Doyle-Peterson report was also obvious to the investigative reporter Jason Berry. From the moment he heard about it, Berry recognized that the document could either save or imperil the institution and he recognized that when the bishops rejected it, they were choosing peril over salvation. Berry would stay on the story of the Church for decades to come. Outside this topic, he became known for works of fiction, nonfiction, and film that dwelled on music and politics. But even when he was tending to these other topics, Berry heard regularly from victims of clergy abuse, lawyers, and other journalists who wanted his help. Eventually he would be all but defined, as a writer, by a story that never ceased to make him uncomfortable.

  Minos Simon, having earned hundreds of thousands of dollars from the settlement of the Gastal claim, predicted that clergy abuse would open up a huge new market for trial lawyers who would find clients in every diocese. Like Jason Berry, Simon was one of the few members of his profession who had successfully navigated this new territory. However, he would not devote himself to the practice of suing the Church. He had other priorities.

  Minnesota lawyer Jeffrey Anderson telephoned Simon for what he had hoped would be a collegial chat about suing the Catholic Church. Among plaintiffs’ lawyers, informal consultations are common courtesy, especially when they involve attorneys who practice in different states. These contacts are especially valuable when a new area of law is being developed, and they add important networking links on both sides of the conversation. But instead of warmth and welcome, Simon gave Anderson just a brief review of the facts Anderson had already seen in the press and few words of warning about the intimidating power of the Catholic Church. With a perfunctory “Good luck,” he then hurried off the phone.

  4. SPIRITUAL BETRAYAL

  Tom Krauel and Jeffrey Anderson would disagree over whether the term “fearless little bastard” had actually been spoken when Krauel referred the Lyman family to him for representation. However, they agreed when it came to Anderson’s reputation. In the mid-1980s he was famous around the courthouses of Minneapolis–St. Paul for providing aggressive representation to the kinds of clients many other lawyers would turn away. He was also infamous for parties that would put a rock band to shame.

  Anderson’s Friday night blowouts began in his office, at around 4 P.M., and continued until the crowd decamped for dancing at local clubs like Tonkin and Oz, where mirror balls scattered light in a thousand pieces and the music was nonstop disco. The attendees included prosecutors, defense lawyers, and the occasional criminal. When a judge was present, the cocaine, acid, and pot were handled discreetly.

  Though he was just five foot four and weighed less than a hundred and fifty pounds, Anderson presided over these parties with an energy that made him seem seven feet tall. The first to laugh, or to dance, he consumed whatever was at hand and everything put him in a good mood. Once the drug of the day sent him up onto the windowsill to howl with laughter and piss on the sidewalk below. In fairness it must be said that the hour was late and the sidewalk was empty. And when he sobered up Anderson admitted that using the window as a urinal was a bad idea. If he had slipped, the landing from eight stories up would have killed him.

  Much of what Anderson did in his early years involved bad ideas. Most of these arose when he was consuming alcohol, which he began when he was fourteen. Back in high school, in the posh Minneapolis suburb of Edina, Anderson and his best friend Grant Hall formed the core of a group that became known for their drunken wild ways. Drinking caused Anderson to miss so many practices that he was kicked off the wrestling team. On one frozen night he passed out in a stubbly cornfield, where he would have died of exposure if he hadn’t been rescued by his friends. He promised moderation, but within a week he was back to getting drunk in the car on the way to a local club called Big Reggie’s Danceland. It was there where one night he picked Patti McDonough out of the crowd. A beautiful dark-haired girl from an Irish/Italian family of twelve, she was the most exciting person he had ever met.

  Patti announced she was pregnant during Anderson’s first semester at college. He did what he had to do, dropping out of school and getting married. Though they attended the wedding, Anderson’s mother and father were sorely disappointed. Stoic Lutherans, Eleanor and Robert Anderson never actually spoke about sex and contraception, but he knew what they expected of him. They covered their living room sofa in plastic, for God’s sake.

  Nineteen and already a family man, Anderson worked three jobs. By day he labored at a warehouse. In the evenings he sold shoes at the department store Montgomery Ward. And when he got home at night he shoveled coal and operated the furnace in the basement of his apartment building. (This job covered the $50 per month rent.) Of the three occupations, salesman fit Anderson best. At Wards he discovered he had a gift for persuasion. Attentive fitting and flirting broke many a woman’s resolve and budget. Purses were opened. Boys were summoned to carry out the boxes.

  With Patti’s encouragement, Anderson enrolled at the University of Minnesota and, in between civil rights marches and protests against the Vietnam War, he finished his undergraduate degree in two years. A magna cum laude diploma helped him win a job at the Leo Burnett advertising agency in Chicago. He arrived as the city was gripped by the conspiracy trial of the famous “Chicago Seven,” who were represented by lawyer/celebrity William Kunstler. From his first day at his tiny, all-white office at Burnett, Anderson knew he wouldn’t stay long. He soon returned to Minneapolis where, inspired by Kunstler, he enrolled at William Mitchell School of Law. Anderson struggled with attendance, but thrived in the school’s legal clinic. After he was admitted to the bar in 1975, Anderson set out to become the Twin Cities’ version of the attorney for the damned, representing drug dealers, madams, prostitutes, and gay men arrested on morals charges.

  * * *

  Minneapolis–St. Paul circa 1975 was a rather progressive place when it came to sex and the law. Prostitution was rarely prosecuted and the state legislature had taken up a bill to advance gay rights. During debate over the proposal, an activist named Timothy Campbell was arrested when he commandeered a public restroom for a press conference and announced he would begin a hunger strike on the spot. At the jail his first call was to Jeffrey Anderson, who eventually beat the charges against Campbell and in the process became the go-to lawyer for gay men arrested for civil disobedience or on morals charges. Much of the money to pay for his work came from a defense fund created by Philip Willkie, grandson of Wendell Willkie, the Republican Party’s 1940 presidential nominee. Willkie was himself arrested in 1979, while protesting in support of a well-known madam named Rebecca Rand, who was also Anderson’s client.

  Campbell, Willkie, Rand, and others introduced Anderson to a sexual subculture few outsiders ever know. He learned about the politicians and judges who frequented massage
parlors and the clergymen who hung around gay clubs. Many of the people arrested in these places simply had the misfortune of being in the wrong spot when local politicians pressured the police to conduct a raid. Anderson’s most memorable case in this era involved a crowd of defendants who were rounded up one snowy night at a sex club called The Locker Room, on First Avenue in Minneapolis. Philip Willkie had been tipped off about the raid and arranged for the press to be outside filming as officers emerged from the building with evidence, including a papier-mâché phallus as big as a canoe. It was transported to the precinct house atop the paddy wagon.

  At trial Anderson demanded that the police display in the courtroom every bit of evidence they had seized. When they reported the penis was unavailable because it had broken in an elevator, Anderson was able to cast doubt on everything the officers did on the night of the arrest. However, his case was truly made when prosecutors wheeled in a grocery cart filled with sex toys. Anderson asked the police officer on the witness stand one question:

  “Is it illegal to possess these items?”

  After the officer answered, “No,” the jury found the defendants not guilty. Anderson, and his clients celebrated long into the night. For Anderson, victories were always an occasion to celebrate with a drinking binge, but then again, so were defeats. More often than not he would be joined by his partner, Mark Reinhardt, who had been his instructor at William Mitchell. In time Reinhardt and Anderson would get into high-stakes class action lawsuits. But in the beginning they both depended on run-of-the-mill clients who walked through the door, and on referrals like the one offered by Tom Krauel in the fall of 1984.

  * * *

  A reserved, by-the-book lawyer, Tom Krauel had listened in shocked silence to a couple named Janet and John Lyman* who came to his home to discuss a type of problem he had never imagined. The Lymans, who were his neighbors, reported that their son Greg was in the state prison in St. Cloud. He had been jailed for a probation violation. He was on probation for two crimes he had committed when he was a minor. One was a burglary. The other involved exposing himself to two young girls, aged seven and four, and coaxing them to touch his penis. Janet had turned her own son in to the authorities when the girls’ parents called to complain.

  Janet and John had been shocked by the nature of Greg’s crimes, but they were not surprised that he had gotten into serious trouble. Angry much of the time, their son had been in different kinds of trouble for years. Social workers, psychologists, and psychiatrists had failed to reach him and Greg dropped out of high school before graduation. He found company with a crowd of kids who drank to excess and committed petty crimes. When he was jailed after burglarizing a liquor store, Greg revealed that had been molested by a priest named Thomas Adamson.

  Father Tom had been a family friend to the Lymans when he worked at St. Thomas Aquinas Church in St. Paul Park. A charming, intelligent, and athletic man—he was both class president and captain of a club basketball team at Catholic University—Adamson had seemed the perfect companion and role model for a troubled boy.

  A nervous and awkward sixth grader, Greg was not athletic, or academically gifted. He wasn’t funny or talented in any way that made him stand out and he wasn’t relaxed enough to fit in. He had blue eyes and almost-white blond hair that swooped down across his forehead, skimming his eyebrows like a sailor’s hat. He was self-conscious about his teeth, so he didn’t smile very much, and his voice was still soft and high-pitched, like a girl’s, so he didn’t talk much either.

  Greg became an altar boy at Father’s suggestion and in this role he found a glimmer of self-esteem. Father became Greg’s best friend, role model, confessor, and protector. The boy had never trusted any man as much as he trusted Adamson. He eagerly tagged along when the priest asked him to go to the gym and thought nothing of joining him in a steam room. It was there, behind a tightly closed door and obscured by the white vapor, that Adamson asked Greg if he ever masturbated and if he liked how it felt to be touched “there.” Greg did not know how to respond. Unable to say “no” he just silently allowed the priest to masturbate him. Before he left him at his home Adamson said, “Don’t tell anybody. You’ll get in trouble and so will I.”

  If Greg had been able to speak when Father touched him, he might have said that this was his first real sexual experience. Instead he allowed himself to be quietly overwhelmed with a toxic mixture of fear, shame, anger, physical pleasure, and profound confusion. Greg couldn’t believe that what had happened was right, or good. Father wouldn’t have warned him to stay silent if it was okay. But he valued his friendship with Adamson so intensely—he loved him in a way—that he kept all of his feelings inside, and tried to act like nothing had happened. He continued serving as an altar boy, and continued going on outings with Adamson. Father’s sexual assaults became routine, and escalated to the point where he was demanding Greg perform oral sex on him. As Greg would remember it, “whenever he got the urge” Adamson would find a locked room where he could use the boy for sex. It happened in a church basement, a gas station men’s room, a motel, and a YMCA steam room. Father took to keeping a small bag in his car so that he would always have access to towels and a vibrator that he used on Greg.

  Although he couldn’t understand, intellectually, the effect of these sexual assaults, Greg felt all the different ways that Adamson hurt him. Sexualized in an abusive and premature fashion, he was tormented by his own sexual obsessions and swamped with worry. The attention and sexual gratification felt good even as they felt shameful. He wondered if he was homosexual, heterosexual, or bisexual and when he tried to stop seeing Adamson he felt so lonely that he couldn’t keep his distance. Afterward he would feel angry, guilty, and remorseful. At home he seemed angry and moody, which confused his parents. They thought he should be grateful and happy that a man like Father Adamson gave him so much time and attention.

  Janet and John Lyman had thought the priest’s interest in their son had been a good thing. When they learned what had actually gone on between Greg and Father Tom they felt rage, remorse, and guilt.

  As the couple spilled out their story for Krauel they described how they had confronted Adamson directly over lunch at a Perkins pancake house. The priest had not confessed, but he did not deny what had happened. In parting he said something strange and infuriating as he embraced Janet.

  “Just you remember,” he said quietly, “that I’m not a wealthy person.”

  While Greg’s parents were confronting Adamson, Greg’s prison counselor spoke to Catholic Church officials who admitted that they had long known of the priest’s sexual problem. Others had complained and Adamson had been required to seek psychological treatment in 1981. When told this, Janet recalled that Adamson had last approached her son for sex in 1982. Clearly the treatment wasn’t working.

  Concerned for other boys who could become Adamson’s victims, Janet and John met with an official of the St. Paul archdiocese named Bishop Robert Carlson. Carlson also went out to the prison at St. Cloud to see their son. At these meetings Carlson expressed concern for the family, for the priest, and the Church. In the end he suggested Adamson help pay for Greg’s therapy. A few days later the mail brought a check for $1,600. John and Janet didn’t know what to do with it.

  Nothing in Tom Krauel’s legal experience had prepared him to answer all of his neighbors’ questions about the check, their son, and the priest who had abused their son. In the near term he knew that Greg needed no criminal representation. In the long term, however, he and his family might have reason to sue for the priest’s crimes. As a devout Catholic, Krauel knew he wasn’t the person for the job, but he had an idea about who might be. As he gave the Lymans Jeff Anderson’s name and phone number, Krauel described him in a way that left no doubt about the kind of representation they should expect.

  * * *

  By the autumn of 1984 Jeffrey Anderson had long lost the beard he once wore around the courthouse as a rookie lawyer. He had had his hair cut shorter and begun w
earing more expensive suits. The effort made him seem a bit more mature and seasoned and made potential clients feel confident in Anderson, even when he had no particular expertise, or experience, related to their problem.

  Of course, in 1984 hardly anyone in the legal profession would have had any experience at all with sex crimes committed by Catholic priests. Anderson had never heard of such a case, but Janet and John showed up in his office carrying the check the bishop had sent and Tom Krauel had vouched for them. If Anderson had been inclined toward skepticism, any doubt he harbored was swept away by their candor. They had accepted that their son was a sex offender and acknowledged the harm he had done to his victims. But they emphasized that Greg was a minor when he committed his crimes and they believed that things would have been different if Thomas Adamson had left him alone.

  As he listened to how the Lymans had been treated by the Church, Anderson heard echoes of the big civil rights cases of the 1960s. They were ordinary people being overwhelmed by a powerful institution and they needed someone to stand up for them. In doing so, Anderson would have to challenge the basic assumptions of a society that preferred to believe the Church was good and that authority figures could be trusted. He had worked on enough discrimination cases to feel comfortable in this role. Indeed, he relished the chance to challenge authority.

  However, nothing in Anderson’s experience had prepared him to understand the spiritual betrayal felt by Janet and John. Although he was raised to believe in a Protestant God, he was not at all devout and could only imagine what faith meant to lifelong, traditional Catholics. Janet seemed especially shaken by Bishop Carlson’s almost casual response to the crimes committed by a priest under his supervision. Sending a sexual offender to psychotherapy and then shifting him to a new parish where he had access to children seemed criminally irresponsible to her. Brushing off parents who complained felt like condescension and rejection.